My Favourite Books of 2025

[aquila1nz]

My Favourites (QueerSFF)

• Song of the Huntress hit my historical Britain "give me Rosemary Sutcliff but sapphic" sweet spot.


• A Sweet Sting of Salt is gentle sapphic selkie historical fiction.


• Navigational Entanglements is now my second favourite de Bodard book, for it's spectrumy protagonists making connections against clan rules and behavioural expectations.


• Metal From Heaven is full on dykey industrial socialist punk fantasy, I don't love Marney as much as Sideways in Scapegracers, but I was delighted to read this book!

My Favourites (Other Scifi Fantasy)

• Liberty's Daughter is a Heinleinesque juvenile, a girl coming of age on a libertarian platform off the coast of the US, note perfect because it's by Naomi Kritzer.


• Leech is cold industrial fantasy horror from a couple of years ago, that's mining a similar vein to Metal From Heaven in a very different way. There's a lot going on, and an interesting viewpoint character, part of a group mind temporarily cutoff from the rest.


• Haunt Sweet Home is a gentle novella about a young woman who falls into a job as an assistant on a Haunted House Investigation reality show, her relationships with her family, her coworkers, her art and one particular young woman are beautifully realised.


• Translation State gave me all the feels with its fish out of water protagonists, and of course there's interesting situationality because Ann Leckie.

Favourite Sequels

Three neat sequels and the end of two trilogies.

• All the Hidden Paths is the continued marriage of convenience between Velasin and Caethari, as they find themselves in the middle of more political machinations. Wonderfully deft storytelling. m/m romance, fantasy and mystery, read the warnings.


• The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is the second mystery set above Jupiter, as an investigator joins forces with an academic to solve disappearances that may be related to the possible future re-terraforming of Earth. Understatedly sweet.


• What Feasts At Night - Alex Easton returns, this time facing down a more personal attack on ka's own lands. Very Kingfisher. Less mushrooms, more dreams.


• The Feastmakers is the final book of a marvellous YA trilogy, full of spiky prose and dangerous choices that I cannot over reccomend.


• How to Get The Girl (And Not Destroy the World) finishes Sian and Trillin's adventures, making the world a place where they can coexist.

Favourite Classics

Some classic reads - ranging between 1881 and 1998.

• I'm glad I finally met the telepathic multibodied 'dogs' of Fire on the Deep (kitchen sink science fiction - there's a whole lot of other things going on), reading Eleanor Arnason's Knapsack Poems story in Women Destroy Science Fiction in the same year was a nice coincidence.


• I'd read the Dreamsnake short story before several times, but not the whole book, and I'm very glad I did!


• To Say Nothing of the Dog is a delightful as time travellers chase a completely pointless MacGuffin through Victorian England and the blitz, I followed it up with The Doomsday Book, which I would say is similarly delightful, except there are a future and past epidemic and pandemic killing characters left and right.


• Middlemarch left me with many thoughts.


• Howard's End was a watch after seeing the movie read, about time!

Favourite Sapphic Romances

I've been reading a lot of fake dating, hospital and Hollywood set romances, but my favourites were a wider range. Shara Wheeler isn't so much a romance as it is coming of age and removing the boxes you've been allocated, I liked the gimmick it makes for a fun read.





Most Read Authors

I read more than one book by at least 14 authors in 2024, but these were the three I read the most by. Haley hasn't been publishing long so I'm almost out of backlog there, but the way that Seanan and Ursula write I should be good forever.





Looking Forward To
Five of the books I'm looking forward to reading this year.

And some that don't have covers yet, so are probably further away:

• Sovereign by CL Clark


• Alecto the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir


• Lady Chaos by Kate Elliott (probably 2026)

Comments

[contrary_cal]

Thank you for this list! I've already added several of these to my library hold list. :)

[aquila1nz]

Excellent!